Vol. 79/No. 42      November 23, 2015

 
(front page)

Thank you for help in Socialist
Workers Party sales, fund drive

 

The letter below is from Naomi Craine and John Studer, the directors of the Socialist Workers Party’s Militant subscription drive and Party-Building Fund drive.

On behalf of the Socialist Workers Party, we thank all of you who participated in the party’s fall drives, which succeeded in getting the SWP more broadly known in the working class, expanding the reach of the party’s press and books and raising the funds needed to continue our work.

More than 2,200 people subscribed to the Militant over the two-month campaign, meeting the total of quotas adopted by SWP branches across the U.S. and the Communist Leagues in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

The 2015 Party-Building Fund went over the top, thanks to many new contributors, as well as longtime supporters of the party’s work. Every branch exceeded its quota, raising a total of $101,098.

Welcome to the many new readers of the Militant. We hope you will enjoy the paper, use it to strengthen labor and social struggles you are involved in and share it with co-workers, friends, political collaborators and neighbors.

We encourage you to take advantage of the special offers on books from Pathfinder Press to learn more about the party’s program and revolutionary working-class politics (see ad below).

The Philadelphia Socialist Workers Party set an example for the coming 2016 presidential election and party campaigns across the country, running Osborne Hart for mayor and John Staggs for City Council at-large. They and campaign supporters presented a revolutionary working-class program, including in public debates with the Democrats, Republicans and other capitalist candidates. They took the Militant, which championed the campaign, to working-class neighborhoods, labor picket lines and social protest actions across the city and beyond, surpassing their goals.

Another highlight of the drive was our experiences introducing the party and its program to working people in small towns and rural areas in different regions.

The Atlanta SWP organized teams to Seneca, South Carolina, where the family of Zachary Hammond has been fighting to get the cop who killed the 19 year old indicted. They also knocked on doors and won subscribers in Red Bank, South Carolina, where white supremacist Dylann Storm Roof lived before he carried out the political assassination of nine African-Americans in Charleston in June.

The receptivity they found to the party and its press gives the lie to the claim by many liberals that workers who are Caucasian are “white trash,” becoming more reactionary, especially in the rural South.

SWP members in Chicago and other cities effectively combined building solidarity with autoworkers and steelworkers resisting the bosses’ concession demands and discussing the party’s program with workers in towns across the Midwest.

Party members and collaborators, including new Militant readers, became more deeply involved across the country in workers’ struggles and winning support for the Nov. 10 strikes and protests.

The campaigning doesn’t stop with the end of the drive. Party members in Oakland, California, reported that during the Nov. 10 actions nine workers subscribed to the paper, 70 others got single copies and three people got Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power.

The success in going over the $100,000 fund goal enables the party to continue its international work with others in defense of the Cuban Revolution and to respond to new developments in the class struggle in the United States and beyond.

As we head into 2016, we invite all those who have begun to learn about the party over the course of the fall campaigns to join us in getting the SWP and its program more widely known — and building actions from the fights to raise the minimum wage and build unions, to protesting imperialism and its wars and telling the truth about the example of Cuba’s socialist revolution. And, while doing so, join us in ongoing efforts to expand the circulation of the Militant to fellow fighters. Contact one of the party units listed on page 8.

Naomi Craine
SWP subscription drive director

John Studer
SWP Party-Building Fund director
 
 
Related articles:
Socialist Workers Party drive for new readers! (chart)
Party-Building Fund (chart)
 
 
 
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